Recently, Deepak and I did a webinar on the impact of machine learning and artificial intelligence on e-commerce content. Machine learning is a huge part of mainstream business practices. According to some research, the artificial intelligence market is expected to be worth $16B by 2022, growing at an average rate of 63 percent from where we are in 2016.

Can you imagine the intensity of this growth? It’s going to have a massive impact on nearly everything we do. We’re already seeing the first ripples of it in both consumer and enterprise businesses: think bots like Alexa.

At CrewMachine, we build e-commerce content for large brands. Our platform is elegantly designed to optimize any type of e-commerce content by identifying blaring gaps, enriching them, and then measuring for building the machine’s intelligence over time.

In this webinar, we talked about how we are at the front line of this exciting new innovation. We’re integrating the concepts of machine learning and AI to create specialized e-commerce content and speed up the content production cycle.

Machine Learning and AI Will Enable Human-Powered Content in E-commerce

Artificial Intelligence has widespread usage across most e-commerce applications, but our focus is on e-commerce content. Why? Because e-commerce content is all about scale. We talk about SKU’s in terms of millions and trillions.

To handle these millions and trillions, you need to think beyond human-powered content production. You need to understand how machine learning can be leveraged to help human-created content. CrewMachine includes AI-generated content modules to solve this burning need.

How It All Comes Together

In our webinar, we discussed big data and the magnitude of data growth. It is growing at a rate of 40 percent and we are looking at around 45 ZB (whatever that means) of data by 2020. The e-commerce industry’s massive growth is a big unknown. The B2C e-commerce industry is pegged $2.35 trillion by 2017.

As we look to the future, e-Commerce is going to be data-driven and powered by predictive analytics, personalization, and other machine-learning related issues. There’s another data point around the robotics and AI wave, also classified as the fourth wave connecting more than 50B devices in 2020. We did the math and decided to incorporate AI and Machine Learning in CrewMachine’s design DNA to resolve e-commerce content headaches like abandoned carts, returned items, lost brand trust and more.

The big question – Want to know how we are driving this innovation? There’s so much terminology with machine learning and AI especially as it is used for e-commerce. Interested in which components we are using the most and wondering how can we explain it all clearly?

Share conferences from BrightEdge have always been quite fruitful for us. Lots of interesting discussions around SEO, content, and e-Commerce. We meet quite a few enterprises using BrightEdge for their SEO needs and are usually looking for implementation partners to facilitate and manage some of this integration.

That’s where eZdia would find value in its solutions. Several e-commerce enterprises have signed up with eZdia post Share conferences. For those of you who don’t know what eZdia does – we are a specialized content solutions company for e-commerce content creation, moderation, and amplification. We work with large e-Commerce brands such as Staples, Amazon, Walmart and others to get large scale content initiatives under control successfully.

But this time around at Share, our focus was slightly different. eZdia recently spun out its content creation platform called CrewMachine. CrewMachine as the name suggests is a content creation platform that blends in the workforce (a.k.a. the crew) and the intelligence (a.k.a. the machine) that helps enterprises identify content gaps, enrich content elements, and track their performance.

Why CrewMachine at All?

e-Commerce content is all about scale. And it is very difficult to preserve quality with scale. At eZdia, we saw this as a recurring phenomenon with most e-Commerce we worked with. There was an inability to optimize content performance across several thousands and millions of product descriptions, buying guides, category pages and blogs. And this would result in lost market share and decreased conversion.

What if there was a system which could help to identify these content snafus easily and provide recommendations to improve conversion? Would you not use such a system? Especially if it tied in with your CMS or e-Commerce platform like Magento or Volusion? And what if we told you that we have a crew of more than 40k members who you could tap into from the platform. These folks could help to take your content to the last mile with the necessary embellishments.

So, this is how CrewMachine found its purpose. To identify gaps, create and enrich content, and offer the needed data and analytics support to loop in the content performance feedback back into new content.

CrewMachine Talk

Needless then to say, that CrewMachine attracted a lot of folks (especially in the e-Commerce) to the booth. Of course, there were a lot of questions around how the algorithms came together to create content magically.

There was also a lot of demand for the free content audit that we offered as the first step to understand their current state of content. There was a lot of interest in the demos and in seeing the whole lifecycle of content in action. Most of the interest came from large e-Commerce but we also saw smaller enterprises flocking to see a demo and trying to understand the AI component.

This conference became a big proof point to ascertain that we’re heading in the right direction with our vision. A vision to create the most futuristic platform that would solve the content problems for e-Commerce intelligently. We saw a resonance from both large e-Commerce brands and agencies in equal measure.

Conclusion

We have big announcement plans around CrewMachine as it matures to become a strong product to play in the market alongside several others. Stay tuned to hear more from us. Meanwhile I will leave you with a few video snippets of the various features that are at work.

As I write this blog, I am traveling down the memory lane to when we started eZdia a few years ago. The two of us with a few friends, and with a dream to disrupt the traditional e-commerce content way with the ‘eZdia way’. We built this platform (pretty quickly) that enabled more than 35,000 folks in the crowd to use the power of scale to create and manage content. No matter what type of e-commerce or what type of content, we had created all the sophistication in our platform to handle this. We ramped up pretty quickly and got validation from various communities. Soon, top e-commerce brands across the world started working with us. We had finally built a strong model using the sharing economies and rock solid platform.

Thinking Customer, Technology, and Innovation – Thinking CrewMachine

We’re product guys. We’re plugged-in and we’re constantly thinking of new ways of doing things to make the customer’s life a little bit easier. With such a large user base validating our platform to churn large scale content, we wanted to bring the platform to center stage. Our mission was to give businesses the power to create and manage their own content in easy ways!

We talked with our customers every day and we were hearing stories about abandoned carts due to poor product descriptions, lost brand trust due to inaccurate information, and returned products due to poor quality. We knew that we could solve this problem, bringing our Content & SEO, technology and product heads together. So we decided to bring the ‘Crew’ and the ‘Machine’ together to create more sophistication in creating and managing this content. The technologists in the team started leveraging the principles of Artificial Intelligence and we started putting our SEO head together.

What if we created a mechanism to identify all the content gaps within e-commerce content and provide suggestive intelligence around it to fix/enrich, and then use the ‘human’ force or intelligence to take it to the last mile? This led to the genesis of CrewMachine to manage e-commerce content by using the power of artificial and human intelligence!

The Future

Our platform is already validated – not only by our existing customers but also by prospects. They flock our booths when we talk ‘smart content’ powered by CrewMachine. And, our product and technology guys are relentlessly listening to customers and building a stronger platform every day. I’ll leave you with a cool video that will show you how some of the largest e-commerce are building their product catalogs using CrewMachine’s AI. It’s all happening here at CrewMachine!